Even after the last page of Ghost-Eye, Amitav Ghosh’s latest novel, the spell lingers. The magical realism of his world is slow to loosen its grip; the real world seems subtly altered. The book sharpens one’s attentiveness—even the sound of leaves rustling assumes new significance. This enduring effect is a testament to Ghosh’s formidable narrative control.
And yet, the novel falters at the end.
More on that later. Let us begin at the beginning.
The novel opens in 1969 Calcutta, in a wealthy Marwari household. A commotion breaks out at the Gupta mansion when Varsha, the three-year-old daughter of the family’s business scion, declares that she wants to have fish—an insistence that is deeply unsettling in a strictly vegetarian family. Then she goes further. Looking at her mother, she says: “That is not my mother. My real mother… doesn’t live here. Our home is beside a river.”
A therapist, Dr Shoma Bose, is called in. She identifies Varsha as a “reincarnation type” —a phenomenon she has studied before. As Shoma investigates Varsha’s supposed past life, the novel opens onto a wider, otherworldly terrain in which hierarchies between humans, nature and non-human forces begin to dissolve.
Running alongside this is a second narrative, set during the pandemic. Shoma is now 85; her nephew Dinu, a middle-aged antiquarian, lives in Brooklyn; and another character, Tipu, manages an NGO in the Sundarbans. Tipu has a “ghost-eye”. Medically, it is heterochromia—a condition in which the eyes are of different colours.
Tipu is intrigued by a trip Shoma took to the mangroves in 1969. “I don’t understand what my eighty-five-year-old aunt in Calcutta, who has trouble breathing without a machine and can hardly get out of bed, has to do with wildfires and droughts and neo-fascists,” Dinu says. Yet that journey might hold the key to saving the Sundarbans from a destructive coal-fired power plant promoted by “an immensely powerful crony capitalist who had ensured the media’s silence”.
The Sundarbans, as in many of Ghosh’s works, remain central—its imagery evoking both mystery and a fragile ecosystem in urgent need of care. The tension between nature and development is palpable, and the book seems to suggest that addressing the climate crisis may require thinking out of the box.
Those who have lived in harmony with nature for generations—people for whom rivers, ponds, trees, reptiles and even stones matter more than so-called development—are presented as central to the solution. Local fisherfolk, the novel conveys, understand the ecosystem far better than climate experts. In fact, science is offered as only one mode of knowing among many.
Ghosh’s descriptions make his fondness for 1960s Calcutta evident—the power cuts, the communist movement, the many strikes the city witnessed. His fondness for, and his knowledge of, fish is also unmistakable. He lingers over varieties, markets and dishes, imbuing them with a narrative richness that goes beyond mere detail.
With its multiple storylines and timelines held together by motifs of reincarnation and climate crisis, Ghost-Eye is an expansive novel—a wide canvas where several colourful elements coexist beautifully.
Still, it falters at the very end. The conclusion arrives rather abruptly, and despite the richness of what precedes it, it does not have the impact one expects. Even so, Ghosh once again succeeds in drawing attention to the ecological crisis, employing a narrative approach marked by far greater delicacy and care than is usually seen.
GHOST-EYE
By Amitav Ghosh
Published by Fourth Estate India
Pages 336; price Rs799